In 2021, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), Musk became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia:
In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers.
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“He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.”
Musk’s Polytopia Life Lessons:
Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.
Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”
Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.
Back when I played first-person shooters semi-competitively, not only would I dream about it, I would “see” (à la blindsight) flicker-flashes of game movement throughout the day, eyes open. Whether they were memory fragments or simulation runs bleeding into consciousness I was never able to determine. The all-consuming relentlessness with which one pursues game objectives is an excellent lesson for life.
I thought empathy was an important tool for successful people. Dole it out judiciously; don’t give it to every negative marginal utility person who sneaks across a border.
Strategy games are actually pretty useful for developing, honing, and maintaining competitive thought patterns, but I’ve noticed that you can have several different successful patterns emerge when you observe a closed strategic eco-system (as it was with my friends when we used to have to do everything via LAN in the 90′s and early 00′s)
My one friend was always good at optimization, he grasped the internal systems of the game quickly and then ruthlessly exploited them. He was very good at turn-based strategy games with a slow start, since it was hard to derail him once he had gotten going.
My other friend was always excellent at seeing unorthodox applications of in-game concepts. He never really excelled at any particular genre, and usually lost, but would have sudden and unexpected victories over the rest of us when he would exploit some interaction in a way no one had considered. It would last for 1-2 games, and then we’d all adjust/incorporate his innovation and he’d go back to losing a bunch.
Another was good at weaponizing aggression; he would figure out how to optimize early aggression, get aggressive right away and maintain that level of aggression throughout the game forcing everyone else to respond to his dictation of when/where/how the game would play out. I think he was probably as good at optimization as the first guy, but he couldn’t stand playing his own game without interfering with the other players. It was like the first guy didn’t consider the other players part of the system, but this guy did. He was great at RTS.